Everyone in the room – the doctors, nurses, Rave, and even me – all thought the same thing, but no one wanted to say it.

For me, it became tangible when I realized I was having visual hallucinations and disturbances and couldn’t hear out of one ear. My blood pressure numbers were getting lower and lower and no one knew why. My chest hurt like crazy and I was struggling to breathe both out of pain as well as panic. The doc even asked me what my advanced directives were – like did I want a breathing tube – which they had never done before. That’s when I knew I might actually die, like, right now.

I’ve written a lot about how I hate asking people for rides, that it feels like panhandling. Even when people assure me that I can always ask and they like doing it, I still feel terrible about the whole process. After I left the hospital in October, my team had set me up with a slew of follow-up appointments; the idea was I was not well enough to go back home and return to normal life, but I wasn’t urgently sick enough to warrant staying in the hospital anymore. In particular, Johns Hopkins runs a “Heart Failure Bridge Clinic”, the “Bridge” being between hospitalization and home. You’re able to access services that regular doctors or cardiologist offices don’t offer, like IV diuretics.

I was able to attend my first Bridge appointment, and it was pretty standard. Other than a small med adjustment, it didn’t seem like a big deal. So when I wasn’t able to find a ride to the second appointment, I didn’t really stress over it. But then I missed a PCP appointment as well. It was a combination of people legitimately unable to make it and me not being in an emotional state conducive to putting as much effort in as I should have. Both Rave and I have been swamped with a preponderance of to-do items that are all “very important” and time sensitive as well.

I don’t remember when we first noticed that my blood pressures were off. I know I had started feeling dizzy and intoxicated without any cause. But however we got there, I started getting these ridiculously and somewhat unbelievably low readings with an average around 90/60. My home nurse told me to keep a close eye on it; well, that’s not exactly true, as she first recommended I go to the ER. When I told her I was feeling fairly okay and really didn’t want to go back to the hospital (can you blame me after a series of two-to-three week stays in the last four months?), she told me to keep an eye on it until I saw her later that week.

I decided to ask Dr. Google if there was some easy things I could do to bring my blood pressure up. This is when I was introduced into my current medical dilemma: as a congestive heart failure patient, I should severely restrict my fluid intake; but the one reliable way to raise and maintain a good blood pressure is to drink a healthy amount of fluids. So over the next few days I drank more fluids that I was “supposed” to and as it were, the more I drank the better I felt and the better my numbers were.

Well, not all my numbers. People with CHF have to weigh themselves every day because even small gains may be a sign of fluid retention and could require a change in your diuretic dosing. Every day I “cheated” on my restriction, the next morning would see the resultant weight gain; usually only a pound or two, but by the end of the week I was up over 10lbs. My nurse was pretty unhappy but we all agreed that since I had a Bridge Clinic appointment that Wednesday, I would just wait and see what they had to say.

Except that no one I asked could take me to Baltimore that day. By Tuesday midnight, I sent the message to cancel my appointment. I don’t know what my plan was, but until they invent transporters I didn’t have a choice. I couldn’t even decide to drive myself, because Rave’s truck is still too broken to pass inspection and she needs my car to get to work. I didn’t sleep well that night. If I called an ambulance, they would have taken me to Hillbilly Hospital, and that was NOT going to happen. I felt defeated and depressed.

Even though Rave has been in hot water at work over how much time she takes off (mostly to take care of me), on the off chance the PTO gods would smile upon her, she submitted a request before she left work on Tuesday to see if they would let her take me to the appointment. We were pretty convinced the answer would be no, but I didn’t have a lot of other options. We were both surprised that when she got to work Wednesday morning, she saw that her request had been approved. She hopped right back into her car and came back to Hagerstown to pick me up.

We made a mad dash to Baltimore as we were cutting it pretty close, and the Clinic is one of those draconian offices that refuses to see you if you’re more than 10-15 minutes late. We even called ahead to see if that would help, but no dice. On top of that, I had only been to the location once before, and it’s hiding in one of the regular towers (instead of in the Outpatient Center) and I didn’t know which parking garage we should use. To make matters worse, there was practically no available parking in the one we chose, so we spent another ten minutes driving around in circles. We breezed into the office exactly 15 minutes late.

The nurse practitioner took my vitals and saw both the weight gain and low pressure – 80/40. She left the office to call her supervisor. Rave and I figured it was to figure out how much IV meds to give me…until more than 20 minutes go by and she still hasn’t returned. Finally, I gave voice to what we were both starting to fear – that they were going to admit me on the spot. Which is sort of what happened. There weren’t any free beds in the unit I would stay in, and after taking my blood pressure a number of times and getting consistently low numbers she felt the best course of action was to send me to the ER so I could be monitored while waiting for a bed. I am very glad to this day that this is what happened, as if I had not been in the ER when things went south I don’t know what would have happened.

Now, it’s good to know that even though my blood pressure numbers were ridiculously low (normal/average blood pressure should be somewhere around 120/80), I was upright, alert, oriented. I felt a little dizzy, a little fuzzy, and I was struggling more than usual with my aphasia, but overall I felt okay. I was more upset at the prospect of yet another long stay at the hospital forcing me to miss something I was really looking forward to (Thanksgiving with some of my most beloved tribe of the heart) and more medical complications and/or restrictions. But then things starting getting worse.

The first thing that clued me in as to how serious things were getting was when they moved me into the ERs version of an ICU bed. I was wired and constantly monitored. They took my blood pressure in just about every way conceivable – while I was in different positions, on different parts of my arms, and with different sphygmomanometers. My numbers were getting even lower – 80/30. 75/45. 60/40.

All of a sudden one of my ears went silent. It both felt and sounded like someone had slapped a thick earmuff on one side of my head. And of course, doctors and nurses and other hospital personnel are asking me a thousand and one questions and now I couldn’t hear them clearly. I was also getting more confused and finding it harder to understand everything that was happening. At one point, someone offered papers for Rave to sign because I was acting so erratically. (Yes, it’s legal, as she is my designated medical proxy.) I do remember someone asking me to state what was in my advanced directives, mostly about whether or not I had a DNR.

That was the first time I really and truly thought to myself, “This could kill me. They’re doing this because it’s possible this could actually happen.”

That was also when I noticed the visual distortion. I saw fireworks everywhere. Lots of red and off-white lights danced everywhere I looked. After images were causing trails if I moved too quickly (or if the thing I looked at moved quickly too).The light was getting brighter, to the point where I couldn’t really see anything else around me. My sense of chronological/linear time goes fuzzy at this point, so I have no idea in what sequence things actually progressed.

I do remember starting telling people, “I’m really scared. I am really, really scared.” Somehow, my reasoning said that if I refused to lay down I wouldn’t pass out or die. I started breathing more deliberately, again thinking that if I just kept willing each breath I wouldn’t stop breathing. The lowest recorded blood pressure was 40/30, although doctors are skeptical that it actually got that low since, in fact, I didn’t pass out.

That was just about a week ago. I eventually made my way into the critical care unit (which they call “stepdown”, as it is a transition between ICU and a medical floor) where we found out what the hell was going on. It seems there were three forces at play, and all of them were playing to win – which in this case means “messing with Del”.

CHF/Edema – In order to avoid retaining fluid which makes my poor heart and lungs work harder, I have to stay under a certain amount of fluid intake a day. I also take “water pills”, aka pills that make your body absorb less fluid and just pee it out instead. However, if I flush out too much fluid it puts a strain on my kidneys, which are already starting to show signs of damage from all this stress. It also leads to…

Dehydration – I am only supposed to ingest between 1.5 and 2 liters of fluid a day, and that’s not just what I drink. It includes any substance that becomes a liquid by the time it gets to your stomach, like jello, ice cream, pudding, salad dressing, sauce, etc. But as we all know, bodies need a certain amount of fluid to regulate themselves. I’ve always had low blood pressure, and 9 times out of 10 that’s considered a good thing. But when I was feeling dizzy and ill and I was pretty sure it was due to how low it had gotten, Dr. Google said the best bet to raise it was to drink more fluid, so I did. And even though I had increased my intake to almost 4 liters a day, I was still dehydrated because…

Infection – My pannus (the hanging part of my belly, the part that the 2012 surgery was about) is super swollen, which I assumed was part of the water retention caused by the CHF. Turns out that was only half of the story. My pannus is, once again, riddled with infected tissue. There isn’t a collection, like an abscess, that can be drained or removed. It is diffuse through the tissues. So my body was using every bit of fluid to make white blood cells and other infection-fighting stuff, which leads us back to dehydration. The lack of available fluids meant that the infection could proliferate faster and more efficiently. It didn’t help that I had to skip taking some of my meds for a month due to some health insurance stuff, and some of them were my maintenence antibiotics. (Bad Del.)

Yesterday I was transferred out of the critical care unit back to a medical floor I have been to before, which is nice because I know and like most of the nurses here. It also means less wires and other restrictions. The infection is pretty bad and causing a great deal of pain – the doctors keep telling me it’s the kind of healing that gets worse before it gets better. I’m on the good drugs for now – vancomycin (antibiotic version of a nuclear bomb) and dilaudid (painkiller version of a nuclear bomb). I’m in a lot of pain, but in a weird way it’s a familiar kind of pain, which makes it a little easier to deal with.

Most people with CHF really struggle with knowing how much fluid they can safely have without causing problems. Unfortunately, for me it looks like the line between too little and too much is very fine, and I’ve been warned that not only will it take some time and experimentation to figure out exactly where that line is and that there will be a lot of fuckups along the way. Fuckups mean more hospital stays.

My primary care doctor has even mentioned that I could go live in a skilled nursing facility – basically, a special floor in a nursing home that’s reserved for people of all ages who are too medically complicated to live at home but not sick enough to stay in the hospital. The idea is abhorrent to me, but if my lack of transportation is putting my life at risk I can’t fully dismiss the idea. Rave and I have started preliminary browsing to see if moving to Baltimore is even possible. However much we hate living in Hagerstown, the place we have is a godsend of accessibility; Baltimore is full of three-story row houses which will very likely not work for us. But I can’t even think about moving with a full heart until I deal with the divorce settlement, because Mike is claiming I have a part-time job with which I can support myself and therefore he should not have to pay spousal support or cover my prescriptions like he’s been doing since we split. I can’t afford a lawyer and few lawyers do family law pro-bono unless there are custody issues. It’s a big morass I cannot deal with without getting chest pain – and I’m not saying that to be melodramatic, I’m saying it because it really does cause me that much stress.

That’s the story of my close call. The reality and tangibility of the end of my journey is coalescing, and it’s a lot more terrifying than I was prepared for. One of my doctors admitted to me that if he were in my shoes, he’d be freaking out a lot more than I am. He even offered to send me a social worker to talk to, which is probably not a bad idea.

If you wanted to send flowers or the like, you can email Rave at delandrave at gmail dot com and she’ll give you the information. It would be greatly appreciated. I’m feeling kind of lonely and sad these days.

I have been diagnosed with stage 3, right sided congestive heart failure. Let’s break that down so you understand what that means. Keep in mind, I’m not a doctor and this is by no means meant to be a completely scientific lesson on heart disease. I am sharing the information I feel will help my friends and family understand how this diagnosis affects me and what it means. Feel free to ask your doctor for more information.

I’m going to start with the “congestive heart failure” part. Your heart is a wickedly smart little organ. It knows exactly how much blood each of your organs needs to operate at their maximum. When one or more of the organs needs more blood, the heart is able to increase how fast it beats, pushing blood faster where it’s needed.

The first symptom I had was that my heart was beating pretty fast – upwards of 120bpm. Obviously, that can be caused by a lot of less serious reasons, so although it was something my doctor was aware of, it didn’t cause any alarm all by itself.

Meanwhile, my right ventricle, the one in charge of getting the right amount of blood to my lungs, thought something was up. It wasn’t getting as much fluid back as it was sending out, which is cause for concern when you’re a right ventricle. It assume that there has been some trauma or injury to the lungs wherein there is blood loss, so it wants to pump harder to make sure the wound doesn’t drain the blood the lungs still need to function.

But in my case, it was not a wound that was causing the lack of fluid return. My body was soaking it up, in the form of edema. That’s the reason my feet and ankles, and then eventually my abdomen, got really swollen. The reason my heart thoughts my lungs were in trouble is because my lungs were really struggling with keeping my oxygen levels high enough to function. The struggle was primarily caused by my sleep apnea – I was using a CPAP setting from 2005, and a lot has changed since then. I need a BiPAP in order to get the right amount of oxygen at night, and the more oxygen and the less carbon dioxide in my system, the less the demand on the right ventricle.

CPAP? BiPAP? Is this like a Pap smear?
No, thank goodness. Continuous Positive Airway Pressure is one way to make sure someone’s airway is open and functioning while they are asleep. If you’ve ever shared a bed with someone who snored terribly, that snore was likely caused because it was the only way to get the passages open enough to maintain enough oxygen. With a CPAP, it gently blows air into your nose (and mouth if necessary) to help keep the airway open.

With CPAP, there’s one number: the amount of air pressure the person needs to keep their passage open all night. However, if the person needs a very high amount of pressure, it becomes difficult to exhale without feeling like you have to use your exhale to push against it. What makes sense is to have two pressure settings: the higher one when you breathe in, and the lower one for when you breathe out. Thus: BiPAP. Bilevel positive airway pressure. BiPAP comes with a second usage, which is that it can also stand in as an external ventilator should someone have significant trouble breathing night *or* day.

I knew I needed a BiPAP for a few months, but I was dealing with a lot of doctor office monkeyshines and did not get it. But I will have one when I get home, as the hospital has taken care of that.

The Right Side of Heart Failure

Like I’ve said earlier, the right ventricle is specifically tasked with keeping the lungs happy. Because I was having severe O2 deprivation due to the apnea, my poor little right ventricle did all it could do. Now it is damaged from being overclocked for so long. Part of the reason it took so long to figure out what was going on is that the symptoms of heart failure are easily attributed to being fat, even if you aren’t really fat to begin with. CHF makes you feel tired all the time, it robs you of your stamina, you lose your breath even when you aren’t doing anything, and then the swelling comes. The edema is made worse when it gets to the abdomen, because then it is putting extra undue pressure on the diaphragm and lungs, making it even more difficult to breathe.

Although I am still a little angry about it, I have come to accept that even though I was clear with many doctors about these symptoms as soon as I noticed them, many of them dismissed me and told me it was because I was fat and I should reconsider weight loss surgery. (In case you weren’t a reader when I wrote my many rants on WLS, look at the tags on the side of this page for more info). I mean, my weight is a contributing factor (but not the only factor!) to my apnea, so in a way it is also a factor in my heart failure. But lots of people get CHF, and getting it at my age is getting more and more common.

What does this mean? Are you going to have to stop traveling/teaching?

Well, Del is going to have to get used to a daily regimen. Not only am I increasing the amount of prescriptions I need, but there are other changes I need to track carefully. I will have to weigh myself every single day (whee!) and do it in kilograms because metric! If I gain even a little bit of weight, I have to call my doctors ASAP to see if it’s related.

I am also going to have to learn how to live with strict fluid intake rules. I am only allowed to have 2000mg a day of any kind of fluid – that’s 2 liters. I have a plan on how to measure this, so hopefully that will work. I’m just from a world where drinking fluids was a good thing, and there was no such thing as too much water.

The reason I have to restrict my fluid intake is because should my body have extra fluid, it is likely going to shunt it into edema, because the right ventricle will be all like, “Hey feet, I got some extra fluid here, so I’m a hook you up!” and my feet will be like, “No, dude, we’re already super full! I’m sure your fluid is tasty but I can’t even imagine another…oh. Thanks.”

The last part I’ll tackle is the Stage 3. There are 4 stages, with 1 being asymptomatic and 4 being severely damaged and in need of interventions like surgical implants, surgery, or transplant if the patient is young enough to recover. 3 means that I have significant symptoms, but we’re hoping that with a minimum of intervention I should be okay for a while. But I’m going to give it to you straight – this is not a thing you take a pill, you stop eating salt, and everything gets better. This will degenerate and become more bothersome as time moves on. At some point, I plan on writing about how this diagnosis takes some of the vagueness out of “Del is sick”. The monster in the closet (or at least one of them) has a name, a face, a sense of reality.

Please feel free to ask questions in the comments below. Just please don’t break my rule of offering treatment options unless you are a professional. I don’t want to know what your Uncle Tommy did to recover from CHF, nor do I want to read that article you saw on how CHF is a made-up disease to sell cardio meds. But at the same time, I want to make sure everyone has a clear understanding of what’s going on with me and how it affects things moving forward.

*BONUS ROUND*

My blood sugar numbers were also wacky out on control when I got here, and I had a great endocrinologist who helped get me back to a normal-ish level. When talking about follow-up and finding the endo, I took a chance and mentioned that I was hoping to find an endo who would manage my diabetes *and* administer T. Without hesitation, he made me a recommendation to a Hopkins endo who does T for lots of different people. Even got me the number of the pysch I need to see for clearance before we can talk about T. He keeps reminding me that this is a maybe, not a yes, because I am so complicated; but he also said it may come down to an informed consent situation, where we go over the pros and the cons and then I choose what I think is best.

Sometimes it feels like I’ve only been in the hospital for 3 very long, very blurry days. Other times I feel like I’ve been here for six months already. I know all the different nurses and techs by their first name (and have nicknames for most of them, like Nurse Anxious or Nurse Snake). In reality, I’ve been here for 14 days exactly.

My days are pretty similar and rote. A nurse comes in at 6am to give me meds and get my vitals. Usually they drag the scale in and weigh me then, too. There’s no use in trying to go back to sleep, because the parade of phlebotomy, examined by the day’s attending doc, breakfast being delivered, the rounding doctors arrive, and then it’s 10am. Even if I do get back to sleep, the whole circus begins again around 1pm, this time with the additions of specialists like physical therapy or IV tech or whomever else wants to talk to me. On and on, I sleep for 10 minutes here, half an hour there. The doctors begin to notice I’m not getting enough sleep.

That might have something to do about me falling out of the bed.

One of the odd symptoms that people with untreated or undertreated sleep apnea develop is falling asleep sitting on the edge of the bed. Many of them don’t remember sitting up or moving at all, others catch themselves nodding off a few times but you don’t think about laying down (at least I don’t). You begin to rock back and forth and usually sometime in this process your hips and back go cataplectic (go limp) and if you’re lucky you wake up as you fall backwards onto your bed.

In this particular incident, I do not remember sitting up, waking up, nothing. I only become aware that I am falling and I should go limp so I don’t break anything. I don’t even have proof I fell from a seated position, and in fact by the way I landed I’m not sure I did. But at the time, I was just aware that I was on the floor, tangled in both my catheter and oxygen tubing. Oh, and somehow in the fall my gown fell off, so I’m buck naked.

The fall made a fair amount of noise, at least from my perspective. However, my door was shut and I didn’t hear anything that resembled the “OMG A PATIENT JUST FELL OUT OF BED” alarm I assumed they implanted in all their patients. In fact, I began to become aware that my call button was back in the bed and I didn’t know if I could reach it without pulling on the tubes I was tangled in. I had just started slowly pulling myself towards the bed when the night tech randomly decided it was a good time to check my foley output. Instead she finds me on the floor, naked, looking pretty damn shook up and twisted up in my tubes. It takes her a moment for her brain to get over the surprise and call the nurses.

So yeah, I think everyone is duly concerned about my lack of sleep. Last night they brought in a BiPAP for me to use. I thought of BiPAPs as being the bigger, badder brother of a CPAP. Something that looked like this:

Or maybe this:

But what came through my hospital room door was this:

Needless to say, I was a little intimidated. However, the night went okay. It wasn’t one of those “Oh What a Miracle!” mornings that some people get when they try CPAPs or BiPAPs, but I slept uninterrupted for at least four hours, which for this joint is like a record.

So when are you coming home?

Nobody knows for sure. I could easily be here for another week, or less, or more. The doctors are basically waiting for my body to say “Whoa there with the pee storm!” – there’s something your kidney does when you’re “done”, and they’re waiting for that to happen. I am making remarkable progress – I have lost over 50lbs of water weight. That’s an average of 4-5 liters a day. I have been taking in less than 2 liters of fluid (believe me, not fun for a fat kid who was raised on the idea that you can always drink all the water you want).

I am going to end with the totally predictable link to my medical-needs Amazon wish list. Let’s pretend I’ve done the “I really hate asking for things and I know I’ve asked for a lot already” dance and you’ve followed with the “Del, it’s okay, shut up already.”

It has been updated to reflect things that will be handy when I come home from this stay.

Again, thank you to all of my friends, followers, supporters, family members, for all the things you do. I appreciate every prayer, every email, every small gift, every visit, every odd chat session, every “thinking of you” e-card, etc. Thank you.

It’s now been officially a week since I have been admitted to Johns Hopkins. Although Rave and I both had tingly spidey-senses that a hospital trip was close at hand, we had no idea what we were in for.

I have been slow in telling people why I’ve been admitted, primarily because I’m still wrapping my brain around it and the effects it will have on my life going forward.

I have congestive heart failure. Specifically, right sided congestive heart failure, which is the rarer of the two. The doctors believe it was caused by my obstructive and central sleep apneas – a long story about which I am saving for another time.

I am requesting as strongly and seriously as I can that you do not ask questions or offer information (especially anecdotal or third-party info) about the causes, treatments, lifestyle adjustments, etc. THIS REQUEST PERTAINS TO THE INTERNET EVEN MORE SO THAN IN MEAT SPACE. One of the reasons I’ve been hesitant to post about this is because I am really not in a space to hear suggestions from everyone as to what to do next.

My second impetus for this post is more practical. In a perfect world, Rave would be here with me 24/7 until I was discharged. In the past, she’s done her best to attempt it but graciously accepted when she needed other people to step in. This time, things are much more challenging for us both as a unit and as two separate people.

What would be of help is people who could come and spend an entire evening with me (Ernie and Cookie Monsters may be warded against if necessary.). Throwing us a tank of gas (there are better turns of phrase, I’m sure) or helping us obtain parking passes. Specifically making plans to pick Rave up and take her to do de-stressful things. Rave may have some other ideas, and you may come up with ways to help that we didn’t think of.

I’m only going to add this next bit because I feel it’s necessary no matter how many times people have said it is not: Thank you from the bottom of my heart. We both loathe asking for assistance, especially with how generous our tribe has been for us, and we would NOT be asking if we saw many other alternatives.

Here’s the thing – I may be in here for another full week. In fact, that’s on the low end of the spectrum. It’s one of those visits where there is a goal to be met that can’t really be influenced by willpower or any kind of effort.

If you feel you want to help, contact us using our shared email address – delandrave @ gmail . com.

Hey there, dear readers. Before I begin, I want to apologize. When I started this blog, one of the main reasons was so I could share information about my health in a timely manner from a centralized location – so I didn’t have to post to every single social medium and then answer comments from them as well – but this time I didn’t feel ready to blog about coming to Johns Hopkins ER or why I came in. I’m still not ready to write about all of it. But here is a little information, a little navel gazing, and a little update. -Del

A while ago, back in March, I started taking on some serious edemitous weight (what we non-medical types call “water weight”, “edema”, or “swelling”) – one doctor guestimated I had gained 50-70lbs of swelling (and he was pretty close to exactly right). I began seeing a long and complicated list of specialists, each of whom happily pointed to one another as the doctor who could help me tackle this once and for all. I was bounced from cardiologist to infectious disease to primary care to nephrology and around again. I got put on several different combinations of drugs, kept on using the pneumatics when I could, tried to limit my fluid intake, etc, etc, etc.

I will admit, I was feeling pretty defeated. Not only did each doctor think it was definitely a SEP (Someone Else’s Problem), but none of them treated it like a big deal. When I had to buy new shoes 3 sizes larger, I barely got a shrug. To me, my Non-Violet Beauregard impression felt like something pretty hazardous but even when doctors was using scary words like “organ failure” and “amputation” they did it with a resignation usually used about troublesome boys.

After all, the list of symptoms I had –

Extreme Fatigue

Shortness of Breath

Apparent Weight Gain (Swelling)

Lack of Appetite/Nausea

Sleep Disturbance

– could all (and were) attributed to being obese/sedentary. When I showed my primary doc that I was losing my breath just from standing up and buttoning my pants, we had a ten minute conversation/debate; she was forceful with her opinion that I was decompensating. (Basically, the opposite of ‘getting in shape’.) I kept arguing that even if I was truly decompensating, I was pretty sure it wouldn’t happen that fast and that dramatically.

But all along, everything that popped up she immediately tried to relate to my weight. In fact, when I came back to her after getting the diagnosis “Volume Overload” (Totally my Del Tashlin cover band), she weighed me to confirm that I’ve had a radical weight change – 60ish pounds in 3 months.

But to me, that wasn’t the shock. It was the magic number. I think we all have one. It may not be the same statistic, but there’s a number somewhere in your life that fits the category.

“If I ever have to buy my pants at Lane Bryant, just shoot me.” (number implied)

The day my scale says 300lbs is the day I lose my shit.”

“When I can no longer buy clothes at the mall because I am too big/short/tall/etc, I will have to kill myself.”

My cousin’s bra size is a 44G. I’d rob a bank to get a reduction before I would live like that.

There I am, standing on the scale looking at the highest weight I’ve ever been. I’m not seeing the magic number, but I’m very close to it. I take a deep breath and start reminding myself that it is edematous weight, swelling, something that will go away once they figure out what is causing it. Maybe a few tears roll down the side of my face, because it’s a number I wasn’t ready for that day.

As we go back into the exam room, my doc makes a comment about possibly revisiting the weight loss surgery conversation. Anyone who has followed my story from the beginning can probably guess how that conversation went. She’s trying to assure me that just because I had ONE bad experience with ONE doctor should not mean I reject the possibility forever. I am trying to clarify to her that this weight is not “Del ate some extra cheetos and skipped aqua aerobics” weight, but “something is physically wrong with Del that is causing water retention at a ridiculous level”.

I left the appointment feeling pretty sure that my GP wasn’t going to be any further help in this situation. Once again, I’m thinking I might have to go looking for someone new – especially in light of what has happened. In the most obvious application of the metaphor, I came to her with a list of symptoms of a serious medical problem of immediate need of treatment, and what she saw was a fat, lazy person who wasn’t taking care of themselves.

I got so disheartened, I stopped giving a shit. I still took my meds and the like, but I stopped making doctor’s appointments. I lost my fire. Inside I knew that something serious was going on, but it was as if I ran around the village telling everyone the Monsters are Coming and the village reacted with affected apathy. It wasn’t until Rave and I noticed that the swelling was getting markedly worse, and now was happening faster than before, that we decided something had to be done.

Now I am inpatient at Johns Hopkins and I know for certain what all my symptoms were caused by and what the short term plans are to get me going home, at the very least. As I discussed things with Winter last night, he asked me what he and the Clan could do to support me in this time, and I paraphrase for you, dear reader, as well:

I feel like I need some time to wander in the dark, bump into the walls, wack my toe on the moulding. I need permission to let this filter in slowly, rather than jump to branding it on social media for the 140 characters times worth of edification faded into the next cute cat meme. I don’t want to have to educate each and every person I talk to about what it is, how I got it, and how we’re treating it. I just want to sit with this for a while, think about it, run my fingers around the edges and see if there’s a contingency envelope hidden somewhere.

When I’m ready, I will share everything on the blog and you will all know what’s going on. Until then, for now, it’s just mine to feel in all the ways I want to feel it.

(And the good news is, I’ve already lost 15 lbs away from the magic number, so that’s reassuring.)

Still at Johns Hopkins, and it looks like this trip is going to end very unsatisfactory. After being absolutely certain that the problem lied in my kidneys, they have now ruled that out completely. I don’t really understand how, as some of my symptoms are unmistakeably kidney related, but the doctors assure me my kidneys are just fine, other than the small stone that is “in a place I shouldn’t be able to feel it”.

So today’s crazy noodle is some sort of lung issue combined with neuropathic pain. The chest x-ray they took showed that part of my right lung is not getting as much oxygen as it should. Of course, this could easily be explained by the fact that I’ve been having crippling flank pain for over a week now, forcing me to take shallow breaths, but of course that would be too easy.

From what the doctors said, it looks like their plan is to run a few more tests, let a few test results come back from the lab, but otherwise begin the transition towards discharge. They’ve already lowered my pain meds; normally I’d be cool with that, except around dinnertime I got another giant stabbing, burning pain in my flank and now nothing the nurses can give me helps at all. I spent most of the night sitting still in the chair, trying hard to find a position that doesn’t make me cry. Gah.

What really upsets me though, is that the doctors are already talking about how I should chase this problem down as an outpatient. However, and it’s not their fault, but I can barely keep up with all the doctor’s appointments I have now. Between not having a regular driver who can bring me from Hagerstown to Baltimore, not feeling well enough to leave the house, not having the money to fill any more prescriptions or other medical shite thrown in my direction, I don’t know what the hell I’m going to do to chase this down. They’re talking about attempting an MRI again, although this doc says she knows of a few machines that might accommodate me better than the one here. The intern stopped by this evening and asked me a bunch of questions that were dancing around the idea I might have MS: this is one of the most bandied about diagnoses I’ve heard since this all began, but the diagnostic criteria are either a) spinal or brain lesions on an MRI or b) ruling every other disease on the planet out first. I might actually be getting close to the latter, these days…

But I have to say, this hospital stay has been exceptionally hard on me. It’s a combination of factors: I’ve been alone more; every time I feel like I understand what’s happening with, and to, me the rules change; I’m in the “historic” building this time (if you think the 1970’s were “historic”) and the room isn’t as cheerfully appointed; I haven’t been able to eat or sleep like a normal human being in more than a week; oh, and let’s not forget Dr. Laing’s shenanigans. I can’t recall if I’ve ever secretly planned to sneak out of a hospital AMA before.

I also am feeling this crushing weight on my heart because, for so many years, loved ones were pressuring me hard to seek out Johns Hopkins in hopes they would be able to solve the greater Del mysteries. Now that I’m here and in the reality of it, people are constantly asking me why. Or why I haven’t moved on to somewhere else. Here’s the truth of it: it’s really not that easy for someone like me to up and move all of his health care around. I mean, I’ve been in Hagerstown for just about a year and I still have at least one doctor in Germantown I have yet to find a counterpart for. Getting my pain management shit transferred was a big deal (although, another benefit of having suffered through the wean is that if I don’t like what his next move is, I can likely find another pain management doctor fairly easily now), and now I have a huge amount of data here referring to my abscess adventures.

In fact, I debated going to the Hagerstown ER when the flank pain didn’t get better. I figured any hospital worth it’s weight should be able to heal a kidney infection, right? But the more I thought about it, the more complicated it got. We’d have to get all the office info for my JH doctors; they wouldn’t have any of the information about the abscesses; they would have to get all my CT results so they could compare now with before; and of course now that we know it isn’t a kidney infection but something more difficult, I’m glad I didn’t.

I have decided, however, that I am using the next few weeks as a time of omens. There are some big questions on my plate that I have been very slowly compiling data on, and depending on how this plays out some of those questions will be easier to answer. For example, if one of the doctors decides to go gung ho on finding MS or something like it, I would be more likely to invest and take the long route. And that’s all the hint you’re going to get.

But for now, I have to figure out how to sleep when my back and side on are fire.

This is going to be difficult to write. I almost never use trigger headings (warning people about potential upsetting topics), but this post deserves one: Trigger Warning: discussion of sexual assault, abuse of power.

There is also an anatomical image of a vaginal opening further down.

I’ve posted to Facebook my frustration over the way doctors have been tossing potential diagnoses at me left and right. At various points in time, I’ve “had” a kidney infection, an abscess on the kidney, a blood borne infection, another abdominal abscess, kidney stone(s), a pelvic infection, etc, etc.

In the course of this, I am being seen by an intern, Dr. Laing. (I am guessing on the spelling. Please note that I rarely use doctors’ real names on this blog, but for him I am making an exception.) At the time, I do not know that this is only his second day on this rotation (although he’s done it once before). He is a charismatic young doctor who looks like he’d make an excellent background character in a college library or Revenge of the Nerds movie.

Dr. Laing stops in and begins to ask me some sexual history questions. As y’all know, this doesn’t phase me at all. He is vague at first, when I ask him how this could be related to my problem. Then he tells me I am getting a pelvic exam to rule out STIs, and other problems with my magina area.

As someone who has experienced real, documented trauma at the hands of a crappy gynecologist, as well as someone who has psychological issues with strangers mucking with his bits, I start to feel a little panicky. I take a deep breath and start trying to make the situation as comfortable and “safe” as I can.

I start by asking for a female doctor to do the exam. It’s not that I have issues with male GYNs, really. I find informing a female GYN of past trauma translates into a much more compassionate and gentle experience. Dr. Laing says he will look into it; a few minutes later he returns to say he couldn’t find one but that there will be two female nurses in the room. I am unhappy (especially since it felt like he only spent a minute looking for a female gynecologist before giving up) but shake my head and accept that the intern will do my exam.

It helps the story to remember at this time that my chief complaint is severe pain in and around the kidney area on my back and side. Dr. Laing informs me we’re going to do the exam in my room, and I am surprised. I ask why we aren’t going to an exam room with, y’know, stirrups and shit. He assures me it’s going to be quick so there’s no need. He is, in fact, surprised that I am surprised.

I should have known something was going awry when he asked a nurse to get all the necessary tools, and when she arrived with them she had to give him a rundown as to what was there. I had requested he use a pediatric speculum, since we weren’t doing a pap smear or anything requiring more than a glance at my cervix. This, too, he pretends to accommodate, by leaving the room for a minute and returning empty handed. I happen to know that JH has an extensive pediatric unit, and I would bet something large that it has at least one peds speculum.

Finally, I carefully lay down, yelping at the pain in my side. Keep in mind, I hadn’t slept in 3 days because laying down was uncomfortable no matter what position – and he knows this. He decides to use an upturned bedpan to raise my hips a little, which digs into the most painful area on my back.

People are probably wondering why I haven’t refused to continue at this point. Again, I mention that the doctor is very charming, and I am honestly afraid that if I really stand up for myself I will get substandard treatment. Also, it bears mentioning that I have been the victim of sexual assaults, one of them perpetrated by a doctor. So being in this situation has already flipped me out emotionally and so I focused on being physically compliant as I could.

I lay down with the bedpan digging into my lower back. We mess around with the positioning of my legs. I am making a constant stream of pain noises and am trying not to squirm. He informs me we’re going to start with the speculum. This is not the tack I would take with such an exam; those of you who have played with vaginas know that it’s better to start with something small and work your way up, rather than the opposite. I accept my fate with a sigh.

This is when things start going downhill fast. He parts my labia and immediately pushes the speculum against my urethra.

As you can see, that’s like aiming for Manhattan and ending up in Staten Island. They’re connected, but not the same thing. Because I am in a fair amount of pain already, I just flinch away and try to close my legs. He takes this as skittishness and tries to relax me. I am somewhat non-verbal, which is exacerbating the issue. He attempts again, and this time I feel him trying to open the speculum as it is resting painfully on top of my urethra.

I react again, and this time he decides that this isn’t working so he’s going to skip to the manual exam. He says his objective is to palpate my ovaries. I tell him that many GYNs have tried to palpate me in this matter and have been unsuccessful. (My ovaries happen to be hiding in an area of my body with a lot of fat tissue.) He asks me to give it/him a try, so I sigh and nod.

Unshockingly, he takes two fingers and presses them against my urethra. At this point, I say something like, “That’s my urethra you’re trying to penetrate.” He apologizes, withdraws his hand, and then returns to push painfully against my…clitoris. That’s right, this newly minted MD thinks the vaginal opening is above the urethra rather than below it.

Let’s just skip ahead. He fails to palpate my ovariesm (not for lack of trying!), and by the time he’s done I think he knows he’s fucked up. He leaves without saying anything to me, which was good since I was crying. Both nurses who were there were shaking and holding their tongues until he left. It was validating to see and hear that the nurses were as concerned and frustrated as I was. One nurse in particular, who was my assigned nurse, went to great lengths both immediately after, and for the rest of her shift, to comfort me. We sat and talked about our lives, she brought me super secret nurse treats, and she let Rave and I go for a walk for half an hour.

Later that evening, the attending (Dr. Laing’s bosses’ boss) and the resident (Dr. Laing’s boss) came in to hear my story. I stressed that this was not a “OMG gyno exams are hurty” complaint, but a “he really should have known the difference between an urethra and a vaginal vestibule” sort of complaint. It turns out that Dr. Laing assured his attending that he had done several pelvics before; the attending wanted Dr. Laing to have another doctor assist him, but Dr. Laing went rove and did it on his own. The attending assured me that I would not see Laing again, ever, and that the attending would take a special interest in my case.

He also gave me the lowdown on what’s been going on. As I’ve written before, it seems like possible diagnoses are spaghetti strands and I’m the fucking fridge. I might or might not have had or currently have:

a kidney infection, otherwise known as pyleonephritis

one or more kidney stones

an abscess on my kidney

a third reoccurance of an abdominal abscess

a peritoneal infection

an STI or other reproductive issue

ovarian cysts

any two of these in combination

The attending assured me that we were only looking in two directions now: we can actually see the kidney stone, but it’s resting on the bottom of my kidney where it should hurt the least. However, I’m not acting like a kidney stone patient. Second, there have been a ton of white blood cells in my urine, which screams “INFECTION”; the current thought was that I had an infection of the bladder.

This meant that right after I had come to peace with the pelvic-from-hell, I had to let yet another stranger muck about in my cuntal region (or is that “cuntle”?) and do something painful. I tried to advocate doing it the next morning, but the doctor really wanted the results tout suite. (heh.)

Anyway, back to the conversation with the attending about Dr. Laing. We agreed I would never have to see Dr. Laing or deal with him in the future, and I further pushed that if I saw him again, I would scream and shout. This ultimatum, in addition to a bevy of other complaints, served me well. I haggled over pain meds in my negotiation about the exam for my bladder and won. I decided to push my luck one final time, and asked him for a standing order for a little extra pain meds when I was particularly hurty. (Otherwise, the process is kinda long: I have to complain to a nurse, who then has to call the on-call service doc and explain the situation, and sometimes that doc has to call my actual doc to verify that whatever I’m asking for won’t mess anything up. This can take up to several hours.)

So a few hours later, three very kind but nervous nurses came in to do the straight catheter. See, when you pee in a cup, sometimes you leave behind skin, hair, or other contaminants in there too. Getting a urine sample straight from the source eliminates a lot of that cross contamination. I know I have friends who get cathed for fun, but I am not one of them. Maybe my urethra is too narrow, or I just don’t enjoy penetration in that way. I was shaking the whole time, but my awesomesauce nurse held my hand and told me funny stories fro her life to distract me.

So that was yesterday. Today’s song is in a different key, a different time signature, a different genre.

From what I understand, we have definitively identified the following diagnoses as being accurate and applicable:

one kidney stone, resting in the bottom of my kidney

an infection, somewhere in my abdomen

severe dehydration, and even IV fluids aren’t doing much to fix that

severe pain in my right flank, that is very sensitive to touch?

However, I have symptoms that are not explained by any of that. So now comes the oddball testing, starting with an echocardiogram this afternoon. I’ve been assured there were be no more pelvics, though.

I’m trying very hard to ignore the fact that three different phlebotomists have tried to take enough blood for a blood culture and failed. One couldn’t find any veins, so he walked away without playing Bingo! first. The second got a good vein, but it was pushing very slowly and meekly, so they only got enough for the little-bottle tests, not the catheter test (knowing the name would likely help).

I keep trying to explain to my doctors that my medical situation, whether it be short term or permanent (anything in between is more likely), is never black-and-white. Now he can order those wacky tests the hospital wants to try out. My nurse keeps telling me I’m scheduled for an echo (which I’m pretty sure is a heart test) this afternoon.

There has been some upsides: The nurse I had yesterday when all this went down, she and I bonded a lot. We sat and talked about my separation, and my relationship with Rave, and teaching adults about sexuality; she talked about some of her past struggles and what it’s like serving the homeless population in East Baltimore.

Um. There has to be more upsides. I have my own room? (in the dingey, “historic” building) Well, I do like my ID doc – who is actually the boss of the ID doc I am seeing at their clinic. I like the resident and attending of Dr. Laing, who are caring and considerate when touching me. I am pleased that they’re taking my pain seriously, and not dismissing it outright when their theories on what’s causing it don’t pan out.

People have been asking how long I’m going to be here. The only clue I’ve been given is that the attending would be happy if I wasn’t here when he gets back on Sunday. However, some of the tests they are doing today take two to three days to finish, so something tells me I will still be here Sunday. How much longer after that, I have no idea.

You may have noticed that I haven’t been as active online as usual – less blog post, no inane facebook replies, not even a “like” on a picture on Fetlife. My Gods put a giant smackdown on my head, and until I’m ready to compose This Great Entry that is, mostly, entirely their idea, I’m to keep my nose out of the Internet. I can give short email responses to timely matters if it is necessary, but everything that can wait, will wait.

I got a writ for this entry, because something somewhat major happened today in terms of my health and well being, and well, this blog originally was a way for me to tell large swathes of people about that sort of thing, so here I am.

The title is two-fold: one, “the jig” being my only slightly explained Internet silence, and the second “jig”, well…is frustrating and good in turns.

You may remember that at the end of my last hospitalization, I ended up with some terrible miscommunication between my pain management doc and the hospitalists. By the time I went to the pain doc to get meds, they had decided that they didn’t want to write scripts that matched what the hospitalists had decided, and ushered me out of the office with even less than a “see ya!”, as the doctor only communicated the end of our five-or-six year relationship via a nurse. I was not allowed to speak to him directly, at all.

Luckily, as I was leaving JH, I had asked my surgeon for a referral into JH’s pain management program, so I only had to find a month’s worth of meds until I was seen there; the surgeon begrudgingly supplied these. Then I had my new patient appointment at JH Pain Management, and I decided that Mistress Poppy had it out for me something bad.

At the first appointment, about a month ago, I was told that they would be reducing my opiates slowly over time. This made sense, as they had reached somewhat ridiculous levels when I was discharged from the hospital; however, my assumption was “reducing to a more normal amount”. (More on this later.) I was then informed that I would have to see a weight loss doctor (but not a surgeon, thank something), and agreeing to that was a non-negotiable point. I tried to explain that I had seen several weight loss doctors in my lifetime, and any time I’ve lost a significant amount of weight I have developed more health and pain problems, but it fell on deaf ears. Finally, I was told that the pain management office wouldn’t actually be writing my scripts – they’d give me a month’s worth, but no more – and it was impinged upon me that I had to find a local Primary Care Physician (PCP – what most people think of as “the doctor”) who would write the scripts for me. Oh, the JH Pain docs would still meet with me and decide the dosages and schedule, but the PCP would be actually doing the writing. I was pretty suspicious of this, but I was assured that they have plenty of PCPs who go along with this scheme, and I should have no problem finding one. (I did ask if they had a list of doctors who “played along”, and was denied.)

Well, it doesn’t take a medical genius to see why this is beyond stupid. The DEA doesn’t give a shit who decided how much opiates someone gets, they care about the doctor who actually wrote the scripts. We called over 20 PCPs both in Hagerstown and in Frederick, and of the ones who actually were taking new patients, and could see me before the month’s deadline was up, only one agreed to undertake this unholy arrangement, but when I showed up in his office he, too, decided against it. He referred me to a different pain management doctor, who wouldn’t even take my call after he found out I was already on opiates.

So my drugs ran out. Slowly, as I have learned over many years to skip a dose here and there if you can help it, should something exactly like this happen. I started calling the JH Pain doc’s office about 8 days before the deadline, and got no response from them at all. It was only when my medical advocate demanded to speak to the practice manager that I was finally, begrudgingly, granted an appointment – in a week. So you were spared a week of me posting self-succoring Facebook statuses about how crappy I felt on practically no pain meds whatsoever.

I get to the appointment today and I am pretty bad off.* This is likely how it didn’t hit me right away when my pain doctor lets me know that we’ve – I’m pretty sure this “we” does not include me – have decided to wean me off of opiates entirely, in the span of one month. I was so focused on please gimme something for the pain and the rocking, doc that I’m pretty sure I totally misunderstood him at first.

But no, that’s exactly what he said. And I guess “we” agreed. So although I was lucky to get scripts – this office has a weird habit of constantly reminding you that at no point are they contractually obligated to write a prescription for you, I guess so you feel doubly grateful when they do – I got the most complicated effing scripts in the history of prescriptions. The instructions on each bottle are a paragraph in themselves. Where a normal prescription bottle may say, “Take two pills every eight hours for pain” or whatever, these say, “Take four pills every eight hours for the first week, then two pills every eight hours the second, then two pills in the morning and one at night on the third…”

I had only enough wits about me, after my weaning-off-Fentanyl experience, to splork the words “Ativan” and “Clonodine” – two meds I’ve been given in the past to treat withdrawal symptoms. With the calmest demeanor ever, my JH pain doc explained that he’s “moved away” from prescribing benzodiazapines, although I could feel free to ask my PCP to write for them.** He did, however, agree to the Clonidine, mostly because it’s primarily a blood pressure medicine that no one would ever use recreationally, ever.

If this wasn’t enough for my poor, withdrawal-riddled brain to wrap itself around, I am now on a mysterious “list” for an “in-patient pain program”. I tried to explain that I don’t have the kind of life where I can just hop off to the hospital for an unknown amount of time, but the odd assurance I received was that this wasn’t happening today, as the waiting list is very long. (Of course, this means that not only will I get no notice on when I will be going to the hospital, but that it could be anytime starting tomorrow until 2020.) The concept is actually kinda cool, in a way that unfortunately reminds me too much of a psych admit: they wean you off everything you’re on, then put you in the program and with a team of pain docs, physical therapists, counselors, occupational therapists, and others. Together they figure out a long-term strategy for dealing with your pain. There is some, but not much, focus on what’s actually causing your pain (as most un-Del like people know that sort of thing), but it might lead to some diagnostic testing, at least.

So where does that leave me?

Well, the last time I detoxed from opiates was, oh, the worst thing that ever happened to me physically. It was done over three months instead of one, with the idea of taking very gradual steps. This time, I have 30 days to go from “holy crap I didn’t know they made a pill with that many milligrams” to “here, take some Tylenol”. At least when I did this last time, I had a different opiate at a steady level. What that meant, was that although the withdrawal sucked really bad, my pain was under some modicum of control. Not so this time. By the end of August, I will be taking Mobic, which is an NSAID, and little else. If this past week was any sort of guide to what life will be like on way less medication, not only did my arms and legs hurt so bad that there were times I seriously thought about wetting the bed rather than having to walk to the bathroom, but my still-healing surgical wound burned so deeply I couldn’t eat. (Which I guess helped the first problem in its own way).

There is an upside, even though it is very difficult for me to see now. Many specialists have turned me away, or blamed my symptoms, on the opiates. In fact, the reason the JH pain doc is doing this, even though I’m dubious that it actually applies to me, is valid. His reasoning is that there is a condition called hyperalgia, where your brain gets so used to opiate medication that the medications start causing more pain, and not treating it. As I still get relief from my meds, I am more than a lot skeptical that this actually applies to me, but even if it doesn’t I’m sure my opiate receptors could use a vacation. Most people who need chronic pain meds take a “vacation” now and again, so their tolerance can lower closer to normal people’s. It’s helpful for people like me, who seem to need a lot of surgery, because there does come a time when they just can’t use opiates at all to treat pain, and there’s not a lot of other options. So by taking a “vacation”, I am future-banking a lower tolerance to pain medication, so any future surgeries will not need the amounts that make each nurse, every shift, look at my file and go, “Um, what?”

And honestly, if there is an answer out there for my pain that isn’t opiates, I’m all ears. I’m not a fan of being on them, and going off of them could open up something very important – the ability to drive. I don’t drive for a variety of reasons, but the first and foremost is that if I were ever pulled over and they thought to run a blood test, I’d be a fucking goner. And there are times when I know my reaction time is slowed down from the meds, and I’m infinitely distracted. So resetting the system may allow me to drive my own car, which I haven’t done for many years.

That all being said, I’m still displeased that this was sprung on me when I was actively in withdrawal. If something goes awry – which it can, which is why many people undergo this sort of thing as an inpatient – I could very well argue lack of informed consent. I probably wouldn’t win, unless my judge has experienced what it is like to be in active withdrawal and a ridiculous amount of physical pain, but I don’t think I’d be laughed out of court, either.

It is very likely that between The Entry They Want and the terrible withdrawal and pain I have to look forward to, I’ll either be on the Internet every fucking second I can, bitching about how terrible my life sucks; or you’ll hear from me some time in September.

*Those who know me intimately will attest to this: I have a collection of pill bottles with one pill in them. In the same way that I hate reading the last chapter of a series of books because the world will cease to exist in my head, I hold onto those pills, telling myself that someday it will be that bad and I will be pleased that present-me saved the damn pill for future-me. This week drained every resource I had, and when I told Rave I had thrown out several now-empty pill bottles, the blood drained from her face. She knows how long I’ve stowed away some of these “last resort” meds, and I spent every single one of them this past week.

**You know, the imaginary PCP I’ve found who will play this stupid game. Well, in all honesty, I do have an appointment at the end of August for a PCP whose practice is under the JH umbrella, so there’s a chance this may work out, but not until after I’ve detoxed from my meds.

It’s been a difficult time. This past trip to Johns Hopkins has left me running on very low energy. There’s been a lot of sleeping, a lot of powering down, a lot of what I call “spoon banking”, times where I purposefully go into low energy mode because I have a lot of high energy commitments coming up, and I want to feel as good as I can when they happen. I’m looking at one of them this weekend, going to an event I’m kinda nervous about for a lot of reasons.

It’s been hard. The wound VAC experience hasn’t been as wonderful as no one told me it would. Basically, to be a little graphic, three times a week a nurse comes to my house to rip out foam that’s been stuck inside my wound, under negative pressure, which has partially adhesed to the wound. It hurts, each and every time, and it was only my mentioning that they used lidocaine when I was in the hospital that the nurse even thought of it.

I’ve started many blog posts, both for here and my other blog, but none of them have grown into anything worth posting. I usually only have a few paragraphs in me before I start to fade, or when all the drugs I’m on kick in and I get all fuzzy and it becomes very hard to focus. I know that people are interested in what’s been going on, have been waiting to hear how I’m feeling and how I’m recovering, but I don’t know how to make a meaningful post out of ‘Ow, sleepy, more ow, more sleepy.”

But even when I’m not actively blogging on a regular basis, I still do check in with WordPress. I read some of the other blogs I subscribe to. If I feel like I need a kick in the pants, sometimes I took at my stats. Mostly I just look at the numbers as they slowly decrease – and that makes sense, as less people read my blog when I’m not writing anything – but I also enjoy reading the search terms, the phrases that people put into search engines that lead them to my blog. Most of the time I find them either educational (I may actually write more about my experiences about both panniculectomies and hernia repairs, as many people come here looking for information about them), or humorous. My most favorite of all time is “If I eat a crow, will I get sick?”, which I assume lead the person to my post about going gluten free.

This week, however, I had a search term that made me ponder. I read it, and it made me think. It said, very simply, “Is Del Tashlin lying?” (I added the capitalization to my name.)

I am not as surprised as you might think I am. I have detractors, and I’ve written about them before. I’ve always been the kind of person that people either really like or really hate; very few people meet me and think, “eh, whatever”. I never delude myself into thinking that there aren’t people out there who have had extremely bad experiences at my hands, or reading my words, or being a part of my life. I know I’ve hurt people, I’ve alienated them, I’ve done or said something that made them think I’m a terrible person.

I honestly believe that’s true of just about anyone. In fact, sometimes it’s easier to find people who think a specific person is a terrible, awful human being, than it is to find someone to stand up for them and speak to their strengths.

When I first met the now STBX, I asked around about him. I didn’t know him very well, and we didn’t have any friends in common, so I was hoping to find someone I could trust who would calm my fears about dating someone so far outside of my social circle. And as the story goes, he had a few friends who I knew tangentially through others (gamer geek circles tend to overlap) who told me he was a stand-up fellow, and I decided to date him. He even admitted to me on our first real “date” that he had cheated on his first wife. I took that to mean that he was willing to be honest with me about both his strengths and his weaknesses, and that was attractive to me. I admire someone who is willing to offer up a full picture of who they are when you’re starting to get to know them. Usually, we’re too busy trying to put our best foot forward, to look as attractive as we can, in hopes of roping the suckers in. It meant a lot to me that he was so honest. It gave me hope.

And before we jump to the end of the story, there was definitely a middle. There was struggles and successes. I refuse to lock all of my good and uplifting memories of our relationship into a box and only focus on how things ended. I am doing everything within my power to continue to see him as I did in the beginning; someone who is neither all-bad or all-good, but a complicated person with as many successes as failures in his life.

In that vein, I’ve asked my lovers, family, and others close to me to keep their thoughts and feelings about the separation to themselves. I have asked them to be civil with him and his new family when they find themselves in social situations with them. Even though many of them are as hurt as I am, feel personally betrayed by the whole situation, because they bought into much of what they saw and felt about him as being not just a good partner for me, but a good person in general. But I think part of what makes that complicated, is that we all try hard to see our friends and family-of-choice as being generally good people. We try to downplay the parts of them that we don’t agree with, or aren’t as pretty or good or civil. How many times have you been in a relationship where you’ve done something to hide your partner’s lesser qualities? I think we’ve all been there, whether it was me explaining away the rampant anti-social behavior of my first husband, making excuses for the anti-semitism of another lover, the untreated alcoholism of yet someone else, etc. I don’t claim to be perfect, and I don’t date perfect people either.

In fact, when I fall in love with someone, I try as best I can to fall in love with their weaknesses, their imperfections, the things that most people would see as negative. I don’t go rooting around looking for them – I know they’ll show their face in good time – but when they become apparent, I open my heart even harder and tell myself that if I’m really in love with this person, I’m in love with all of them – even the parts that embarrass me, or that aren’t socially acceptable, or the parts they hate the most.

Sometimes this can be healing: I’ve loved many people’s bodies when the owner of that body couldn’t. I’ve loved people’s fight with their sexual orientation or gender identity. I’ve loved them as they made choices that would turn out to be bad for them, or bad for both of us. I strive to love beyond just the good parts, the hidden parts; to me, that’s the ground where real intimacy lies. When you can look into someone’s inner monsters and tell them they are loved.

How does any of this have to do with whether or not I’m a liar?

I used to be a really big liar. Growing up, lying was like breathing. I remember telling kids in the new school I found myself in, 4th grade, that I had a metal implant in my leg. Whenever I felt ignored or left out of something, I would go to one of them I had spun this tale to, and would say something like, “My ‘ML’ hurts!” and they would immediately leave whatever they were doing to spend time with me.

I find that story funny now, for somewhat obvious reasons. Now a days, I am terrified to talk about the depth and breadth of my disability, specifically for many of the reasons that I lied about it when I was 11. I don’t want people to be my friend out of pity. I don’t want people to stay away from me because my chronic illness makes being my friend/lover more difficult. I don’t want to shake the “I’m in the hospital” banner too often, lest it start to feel like a child crying “wolf”, and not being able to rally support when I really need it.

I also had to face a big challenge from Loki during my shamanic crisis. One of the things He demanded from me was that I never lie. I can bend the truth, I can embellish for storytelling purposes, I can avoid talking about something or omit details: some people see these things as equitable to outright lying. And maybe it is. But the promise I made was that I would never say something that was out-and-out untrue.

I am not perfect. When I am upset, especially when I am in an argument, I am apt to say whatever comes to mind in the moment, including things that are said merely to wound the person hearing them. Frequently, these things are untrue. In the moment, I find it extremely difficult to hold back from doing that; my passion takes over and my desire to hurt the person who is hurting me takes over. I hate it, it’s a part of me that I see as imperfect, a part of me I would hide from people if I could.

I sometimes know what I have to say in order to get a certain response. People who see me in the hospital sometimes comment that maybe the reason I run into problems with pain management is because I can look at a doctor and calmly tell them I’m in 9 out of 10 pain. I’m not crying, or rocking back and forth, or breaking down. I can be emotional about some things, but pain is no longer one of them. I deal with pain so often, almost always, that it is totally possible for me to truly be in excruciating pain and still have a calm demeanor. With these new bandage changes, I would be completely wrecked every other day if I let the pain take me to such an emotionally rendered place. I need to stay stoic so I can get up, go on living my life. If I let all the pain I feel all the time control my emotional state, I would very likely never get anything done ever, and would spend every single day in bed falling apart.

That’s part of what has made the last two weeks especially difficult for me. I’m not far from that. The bandage changes are Monday/Wednesday/Friday, first thing in the morning, and I find that at least for now, those days are basically “survival” days. I’m happy if I do more than just watch streaming video and use the bathroom those days – feeding myself is a victory. This weekend will be a test, to see if I can heal enough from Friday’s change that by Saturday, I can have a little fun and teach some classes. I’m totally up for the challenge, and I have to be: sometimes wound VAC treatments can last more than three or four months, and I have a very deep, very big wound. On the brighter side, I am showing some small signs of healing already, but it’s not going to be a short journey. I will be working in and through this for a long time, and I know that I am going to have to start making those days more productive if I’m going to get through this mentally.

I understand that I could choose to take more time off, to decide that this isn’t going to get any better and just close myself down until the wound is better. The problem is? I just did that, from August to February. I don’t want to do that anymore. I have a strong emotional and mental need to get out of the house, to get back to a semblance of a normal life, or as much of one as I can handle. I know I can’t be a superhero all the time, and that I will have to make choices all along the way to remind myself that I’m still not “well”, whatever that means these days. But I refuse to just sit in my house and feel sorry for myself and my pain for a year or longer. Seven months was enough.

I also accept that this is the new normal. I know a lot of people use the idea that “someday things will get better” as a way to keep their spirits up and hope alive. I have learned, through the last year’s experiences, that saying that to myself is lying. I struggled in my marriage to remind my spouse that there was no magical day coming when I would no longer have chronic pain/illness/disability, that there was no magic doctor out there waiting to give me a magic diagnosis that was going to fix everything. To me, where I am in the process, that sounds about as realistic as winning the lottery and marrying royalty and living in luxury for the rest of my life. I know that’s not my road, I know it in my bones, and I refuse to let anyone around me live in that illusion, so I have to start with myself.

I have to accept each moment as it is, not as I hope it could be, or how it might be someday. I have to accept that even if the wound VAC does what it’s supposed to and keep me from getting any more abscesses, it doesn’t mean that I won’t still have chronic pain, worsening diabetes, diminishing mobility, etc.

When I was in the hospital this last time, someone I’ve been kinda sorta flirting with came to see me. That was a big deal to me, because I still struggle with being completely open with potential lovers about the reality of my health situation. My STBX really made me gunshy about that; I don’t want to feel like I’ve sold someone a bad bill of goods by convincing them I am more healthy/painfree than I reall am, but at the same time, I don’t want them to think that every single day of being in a relationship with me will be about doctors and hospitals and medical devices. It was hard for me to have my crush there, but it was also important. I needed to know that they understood that this is an integral part of my reality now; that for me, being in the hospital is a somewhat “normal” event, rather than the earmark of an emergency. I needed them to see what it’s like to wait for days as doctors try to figure out what they’re going to do, which is very unlike the image we get from television that doctors are obsessed with just your case and is putting all of their resources towards you until they have an answer. There’s a lot of hurry up and wait in the world of dating someone with a chronic illness.

It’s hard, because in some ways it’s like leading the conversation with your inner monsters. You don’t get the option of hiding it, or waiting until something happens to reveal what makes you less than perfect. From the moment you spend more than a few minutes with me, my imperfection is brutally honest with you. It’s there, in a way I can’t lie about.

Am I lying? Man, I wish I were. I wish I had the luxury of making all this shit up, when in actuality I’m in great health and having a wonderful time day to day. I wish my life was full of all the things I wish I could have, the things I expected I would be doing at this age. I wish I could go out tonight to a bar, have a few drinks, hang out with my friends, and go dancing. I wish I could create a world where this wasn’t my day to day existence, believe me.

But I will always have detractors. I will always have people, for whatever reason, who feel the need to either highlight the honest imperfections I have (which I don’t mind so much), or make up shit to make me look bad (I mind a bit more). But in the end, the only weapon I have to win something like that is to keep on keepin’ on, living my life as honestly as I can, and prove them wrong by just being as open and honest as I can.

So in case you Googled “Is Del Tashlin lying?”, the answer is yes. Every day, Del Tashlin is downplaying how much pain he is in. He is pretending to be totally okay with all of his chronic health problems, and that his disability never depresses him or makes him angry. He lies to himself, all the time. But to you? That’s up to you to decide. Google won’t know the answer.

12 days after being admitted through the ER and the decision has finally been made: I am having surgery tomorrow.

In a way I guess it’s a good thing we waited, as I have a very clear understanding that we have tried every other option before jumping to surgery, and in fact the lead team on my case, Plastics, has been dragging their feet for several days after the other teams (Infectious Disease, General Surgery, Acute Pain Management, etc) all decided that surgery was the best option left.

Yesterday was the final straw. As I’ve written before, they have put several drains into my abscess in hopes it would deflate on its own, and for the 11 days I’ve been here we haven’t seen any fluid come out at all. Interventional Radiology, the team that deals with the drains directly, informed my surgeon that the fluid inside of my collection(s) was too thick to drain this way, but my surgeon was stubborn and wanted to try one last time before he gave up for good. They poked a new, wider hole into the collection and then even went so far as to attach it to suction, and still nothing came out.

The surgery is not exactly the same as the one in December in a couple of ways. The December surgery did entail removing an infected abscess but there was a lot more infected tissue that wasn’t incorporated into a collection, enough to require a panniculectomy. When they finished the surgery, they removed some excess skin and pulled my belly up, making it much smaller (technically, a “tummy tuck”), and I had a very large surgical scar that went from one hip to the other. I also had two small grenade-shaped drains (JP drains) that helped suck out excess fluid produced from the surgery.

This time, they will be removing an infected abscess, but the focus is on trying to keep this from happening over and over again. They’re going to re-open a small portion of the scar from December (about a third, or 9-15cm) over the collection, remove the abscess and all the other bad stuff around there, including physically washing the space out. Then, instead of sewing or suturing up the wound (which will be “the size and shape of a small loaf of bread”) like you’d expect, they’re going to “pack” the hole with a special kind of vacuum-bandage. The idea is that if they just sew the hole closed, the hole will sit there empty, and nature abhors an empty space. By packing the wound, it is forced to heal from the inside out, and the scar tissue created will keep it from reforming a new and/or different abscess in the future. By using the motorized system, any fluid that is created from the wound or left behind by the surgeons during the operation will be sucked out in a more efficient method than the drains we used last time. (I have a bad history of having drains “fall out” before they’re done doing their job, no matter how many precautions are used to keep that from happening, and that could very well be contributing to the problem.)

I will likely be in JH for another week or so in recovery, and then sent home with a home-care-nurse visiting three times a week. They’re telling me I should be able to work (including teach classes and stuff), so I haven’t cancelled any of my upcoming gigs. I will have at least one, maybe two, small motors I will have to port around with me, but I’m inventive and will figure out some fashionable way to do it and not look bad.

I haven’t had much more time to ruminate on the spiritual meaning of all of this beyond what I’ve already posted. I’m trying very hard to see this situation as not being all about me, but at the same time not allowing others to use me/my medical situation against me in some way. It’s been difficult, especially lately, but I just keep holding my head high and be the man I want to be and let everything fall as it will.

I asked Alex if he could think of some witty vacuum joke or reference I could turn into the title of this entry, but joking about it would inaccurately convey my emotional state. I’m not depressed or amused; I’m pissed. I’m angry that it took 12 days for the doctors to do what they told me was going to happen 12 days ago. I’m angry that last time I was given all this lead time to prepare, and this time we have practically none. I had a very clear image as to what it all meant, why it was happening both physically and spiritually, and what I was supposed to get out of it. I understood it.

This time I have no idea. I have some guesses as to what it means, but they’re really just shots in the dark – and I’m also willing to accept that maybe it just doesn’t have a bigger meaning to it at all. I understood that the abscesses were something that happened because Dr WLS fucked up my ventral hernia repair that April, but this one doesn’t seem to be directly related to that, either. Last time I was able to garner support not just because of the health crisis, but because it coincided with my husband ending our marriage. Instead, this time, it all just feels like it’s landed on my lap and I have no idea why, or what I’m supposed to learn, or why this would have any meaning at all, other than to make me miserable and in pain and reinforce my fears that I can’t live a normal life ever again.

It reinforces a lot of the fears I was able to squelch last time, stuff about my divorce and my living situation and trying to figure out who really cares about me and who doesn’t. It makes me look really hard at the prediction I received three years ago, that said in year three the game would change dramatically. As my STBX basically disallowed me to talk about the prediction at all, I learned how to put it out of my mind, but these days it is feeling more and more relevant and yet harder to accept as being real. It’s dredging up a lot of inner stuff I was able to bury and/or hide for a long time and making it impossible to ignore. It’s forcing me to really and truly think about the word family, what it means, what the qualifications are, and what to do when someone who used to be an important member of your family makes it clear that they don’t feel the same way anymore. I am thinking about what honesty is, and where honesty is important, and yet where honesty can be hurtful and/or cruel at the same time. I’m thinking about a lot of things.

But at least now you all know that the surgery is for real, it’s happening tomorrow at some point, and you’ll all know one or another that I got out of it safely (or not). I will be spending some time this afternoon updating my will and advanced directives to make sure they reflect my most current realities.

Please feel free to pray for me, to ask your Gods (and mine as well) to look out for me, to guide me through this process, and to bless the doctors with clear heads and deft hands. Please do not send energy or Reiki of any kind; although I do have an anti-Reiki amulet to wear, it just makes things easier if you don’t send it for starters.